Underhill Nail Cabinet

I watched a lot of episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” without realizing that the image of a bawdy woman in the background was an old beer advertisement tacked to the inside of Roy Underhill’s nail cabinet. When Chris Schwarz wrote an article in PWW on re-creating this cabinet I knew I had to build it. It’s cheap on materials, made all out of pine — although I substituted Alder for the drawer fronts. The most expensive part is the library card drawer pulls.

Interior of the cabinet

The build started by constructing a simple box. I could have nailed this together, but Chris said to dovetail it and I did. It was great practice and a real confidence booster, even though the dovetails are COMPLETELY hidden in the finished cabinet.

Nice, tidy, hand-cut dovetails…soon to be hidden under nailed-on trim

Once the cabinet was dovetailed, I build the egg crate structure that holds the shelves. This was the trickiest part of the project, the cuts to allow the horizontal and vertical parts to intersect had to be fairly accurate so there wouldn’t be gaps.

Egg crate dividers for shelf supports

Then the instructions call for nailing battens along the outside to re-create the original – which was made from a discarded crate. This was hard, not because it was difficult to do technically, but because I was proud of the nearly perfect dovetails I’d done. Oh well.

Finally, the door was a simple farme-and-panel construction, with mitered corners.

Door glued up with miter clamps

The finished cabinet came out great, but I STILL don’t have it stocked with nails and screws. For every project I end up driving to the local HW store and buying six or eight screws in each size I need. maybe I’ll order some cut nails and plain slotted screws this week.